Customer Reviews

Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality

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A collection of old articles from the nineties, rewritten in book-form. Some chapters seem a bit dated. The empirical basis of the book is aggregated data from the eighties and nineties and two case-studies, one from Chicago's South side and one from the suburbs of Paris based on participant observation.

Wacquant's idea of quantitative analysis seems to be to use aggregated data to illustrate what he thinks are explanations to the phenomena he is describing. Not sure it is really convincing. Nor is his theory of unemployment being the reason for the marginalization of ethnic minorities. Some interesting points still. Especially his comparative analysis of ghettos in Chicago and Paris. He argues convincingly that the ghettos in Europe are different from ghettos in the US, and thus that we are not witnessing an americanization from below of European societies.